While we witness a little return of interest towards psychedelic culture since a few years, it was quite rare that popular subculture would refer to psychedelia in those bleak mid 80’s (at least before rave would bring back rainbows, bubbles and acid). Still a few groups like Psychic TV and Spacemen 3 kept the endless trance inducing jams and the quest for musical (et al.) mind exploration going.
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“taking drugs to make music to take drugs to” – psychedelia in the 80’s and early 90’s with Spacemen 3
20 FebPsychedelic Tableaus: “Book of Days” by Meredith Monk and “Power” by Kanye West
13 FebWhen I first saw the video to Power by Kanye West something about it struck me as surprisingly psychedelic. But I could not really put my finger on it: was it the heavy and over the top symbolism, was it the kaleidoscopic yet very straight sensual overload or was it just the idea of a painting slowly beginning to move and expand?
I lost track of this intuition until I just reacently saw this excerpt from Book of Days by Meredith Monk. And there it was again..
The Main Drag “Dove Nets” directed by Ben&Julia
12 FebThis beautiful clip was sent to us by it’s very talented creators – Ben & Julia.
Their Vimeo page features more of their sweet psychedelic work.
Kutmah throwing stones
10 FebDJ Kutmah will be throwing stones this friday in Tel-Aviv.
check out the event on facebook.
Sexy StrataCut
5 FebThe clay animation technique used in this video was featured on DPV with the works of David Daniels.
Lacerated Memory – The Gruntled
4 FebThe disgruntled’s video clip, “Lacerated Memory” reminded me of the sixties and early seventies psychedelic aesthetics of The Prisoner (1967), The Wickerman (1973) and maybe that weird Polanski film vampire film,”Dance of the Vampires” (1967). The effect is quite chilling and weird but definitely reverberates.
(Link: Richard. Thanks!)
so intense: double rainbow high on autotune with the Gregory Brothers
23 JanMy question to you today is: can the youtube hive mind trip? or: whose hallucination is this?
V stands for..: Bert Brecht had his V-fx (distancing effects). Originally intended to make you think all the way “across” the distance set by the “Verfremdung” (estrangement), it seems by today’s standards you have to put in lots and lots of V’s to get things at least a little bit real.
Exquisite corpse: The surrealists had automatic writing. It was a bit uncanny to realize that language was making sense while you did not intend to. Who is making sense here? And when language can make sense without your intention, who did just say that, or: what exactly is dependent on your intention? Thoughts like that can easily become psychosis inducing.
So before the internet, before the notion of the hive mind the question of superindividuals was there, too. Social technologies like language can be conceived as collective unconscious mind. So, why shouldn’t it trip?
“I believe that one day we could have an accidental singer on top of the charts” The Gregory Brothers gave us “accidental singing”. What a nice term!
Sleeping Beauty In meta-musicals like Singing in the Rain people started dancing in the middle of everyday situations. A rhythm surfaced from a silly walk and the dance – it seemed – just followed naturally. By the act of movies like Singing in the rain the world was enriched with virtual dance waiting to be released from the rhythms surrounding us. Now our world has been enriched by a song sleeping in every news flash, voice or video post, in virtually all recorded language, waiting to be kissed awake by autotune.
Maybe V-effect has been translated to virtualizing effect without anyone intending, maybe the rainbow has never been so bright, so vivid, so intense, maybe one of the most familiar things today is living in a post-psychedelic culture.
Broadcast- Papercuts
22 JanI used to love this band so much! long stoned afternoons of a Jerusalem summer listening to Broadcast, but that hadn’t happened for a couple of years now. Sadly, I started looking for their videos only this week, when I heard about the untimely death of Trish Keenan, their lead singer. The hypnotic object spinning in this video is a dream machine, that 7eit posted about here. So beautiful.
